People often seek employment at jobs for which they are not well suited. The prospective employee may be influenced by salary, location, responsibility, esteem, and other desirable aspects of a position. Unfortunately, factors in the individual's personality, attitude, and task-processing style may cause the person to be unhappy with the job and unable to perform at a level consistent with the employer's expectations. Accordingly, it is likely that the employee will either quit after a short time on the job, or perform poorly so that both the employee and the employer will be dissatisfied.
To avoid this result, some corporations have begun to use personality profile tests that attempt to determine whether a prospective employee possesses certain characteristics that are believed appropriate and important in an employee selected to fill a specific position. These tests usually include multiple choice questions, a subjective evaluation by a psychologist, or both. While such tests may give some insight into certain aspects of the applicant's personality, they are generally incapable of answering more critical issues that directly affect the person's likely satisfaction with the job and subsequent performance if hired.
Prior art psychological tests have not included effective tools for assessing how an individual will process tasks, i.e., to determine a person's task-processing style. Instead, such tests try to develop data that describe the examinee's personality traits. This information may be useful in determining whether a person is trustworthy or for predicting an individual's ability to learn a new skill, but it does not help in evaluating the person's task-processing style.
Virtually every job involves some form of task-processing activity. The problems that arise on a job may be long-term tasks that must be completed by developing a multi-faceted solution, or, may simply represent the daily, routine decisions that an employee must make. Some courses of action or decisions are made only after assimilating a multitude of data, or alternatively, may be based on nothing more than an opinion. Regardless of the complexity of the situation, each individual typically exhibits a characteristic style in processing a task. One person may repetitively review all available data before beginning a task; another person may make decisions or start a task with only a minimal input of available data.
Determining an individual's task-processing style is particularly important if a significant portion of the employee's job involves processing tasks in prescribed ways. Accordingly, there is a need for an assessment that an employer can make of a prospective employee to determine the individual's characteristic task-processing style. The assessment should determine how an individual handles a situation, how the person processes data that can be used in resolving the situation, and how the person goes about developing a resolution to the situation. To minimize costs, the assessment should efficiently evaluate individual characteristics of a person's task-processing style using objective criteria that are subjectively applied to determine a person's suitability for a job. An assessment of this type would also be valuable in the fields of education, personal career evaluation, and in health sciences.
Several studies have been made of how people process and evaluate information in making a decision. For example, U. Dahlstrand and H. Montgomery reported on such a study in their paper "Information Search And Evaluative Processes In Decision Making: A Computer Based Process Tracing Study" Acta Psychologics, Vol. 56 (1984), pp 113-123. In this study, 26 subjects were asked to choose among five flats (apartments) by interacting with a computer on which information about each flat was available. Each flat was described in detail with regard to eight attributes, including rent, location, size, quality, floor plan, type of structure, surroundings, and access to public transportation. For each subject, the computer recorded the sequence of data accessed by the subject, a rating of the attractiveness of each presented aspect, and ratings of eligibility of each alternative after each tenth aspect presentation, along with the latency of each aspect presentation. The data compiled on the computer for each subject were analyzed to determined the number of times the subject requested information on an alternative and then ranked the alternatives by the amount of attention paid to them by the subject. However, this study was not intended to evaluate a particular individual's task-processing style; instead, it served to provide general and statistical information about how a group of subjects reached a decision so that the investigators could better understand the decision-making process.
In a report entitled, "The C.I.T.I.E.S. Game--A Computer-Based Situation Assessment Task for Studying Distributed Decision Making" by A. Rodney Wellens and D. Etgener, published in Simulation & Games, Vol. 19, No. 3, September 1988, pp. 304-327, a game developed for conducting empirical research on strategic decision making is described. This game is played by a group of four subjects that are divided into a fire-rescue team and a police-tow team of two members each. The teams are each instructed to respond to simulated emergencies and are given the task of protecting the lives and property of the inhabitants of an imaginary township. A touch-sensitive computer monitor displays city maps on which emergencies are identified as they arise in the imaginary township. Various icons graphically represent the types of emergencies that occur and indicate the appropriate team to respond. For each region displayed on the city maps, selectable information screens are provided that describe any emergency arising within that region in greater detail. More information is also available to the teams by successively touching a dialog box portion of the screen labeled "MORE INFO," by causing a succession of summary charts to be presented on the monitor. The teams respond to the emergencies by assigning resources such as fire trucks or squad cars to handle the emergency. If the assigned resources are insufficient, the controller causes the emergency icon on the screen to remain red; the icon turns purple if events accelerate out of control. Resources can be reassigned to higher priority emergencies, if the team chooses to do so. The computer records data indicating the amount of information sought by each team before assigning resources to an emergency and includes variable "growth" curves that define how the event magnitudes and frequency of events are determined.
By studying the data produced by teams playing the C.I.T.I.E.S. game under different conditions, the researchers have evaluated the effects of team-to-team communication bandwidth (i.e., team intercontact, computer conferencing, audio conferencing, and two-way TV) upon situation assessment, social dynamics, and team effectiveness. The report also suggests that the game can be used "as a diagnostic and training tool," noting that "considerable individual differences in event and team `management` style" have been evident. However, the report does not suggest or teach how the game might be used for assessing an individual's task-processing style; it appears that the game is more suited to evaluating the manner in which people work together in a team.
Although each of the above-noted studies have made use of a computer for presenting information to subjects being evaluated and for collecting data covering the subjects' response to a situation, these studies and other related prior art do not disclose how to identify or quantify a specific individual's characteristic approach to resolving a situation or carrying out a task. Information that defines an individual's characteristic task-processing style might include: the extent to which a person accesses input data before producing output, i.e., starts processing the task; an indication of how decisive versus selective the person is in making decisions; the nature of the person's output, i.e., whether conceptual, selective, or implementive; data showing how methodical the person is in processing information, i.e., input data, in resolving a situation; and an indication of whether the person tends to work on specific parts of a resolution or is very general in developing a resolution to a situation. Use of a computer to quickly and objectively assess a person's task-processing style is clearly important to eliminate subjective bias and to efficiently complete the evaluation of the individual's task-processing style within a reasonable time.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for assessing the task-processing style of an individual. A further object is to evaluate the individual's task-processing style by presenting the person with a relatively complex, but loosely structured task and to provide the individual with many different sources of information that are relevant to processing the task. A still further object is to conduct the evaluation with a computer, and thus, to efficiently collect data useful in assessing the person's task-processing style. Another object is, prior to beginning the assessment, to train the person to: use the computer, access the information that may be helpful in resolving the situation, and input a resolution to the task. Finally, it is an object to process the data collected for the individual during the exercise and to produce objective parameters that define how the person resolves situations. The foregoing aspects and many further attendant advantages of this invention will become apparent by reference to the accompanying drawings and the Detailed Description of the Preferred Embodiment, which follows.